Suspect Axel Muganwa Rudakubana was due to plead in Crown Court on Friday on three counts of murder and ten of attempted murder over a knife attack on children earlier this year but his court date appears to have been scotched without explanation.
A planned court date at Liverpool Crown Court for the alleged Southport attack knifeman has not been kept, leading to questions over why this important and widely discussed trial has apparently been delayed, and why this development has come without comment from the prosecutor and government alike. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana was arrested on the same day as the July 29th Southport attack, which saw three young girls slain by a knifeman.
18-year-old suspect Rudakubana last appeared in court in August shortly after the deadly mass stabbing, when he was formally charged with the murder of three young girls and the attempted murder of ten more children and adults. At that court appearance when he was officially named for the first time, the judge named October 25th — today — for the Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing.
As stated by the Crown Prosecution Service, at a Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing the accused hears the offences held against them, and is asked to plead guilty or not guilty. Should he have pleaded not guilty and if the case went to full jury trial, it was provisionally slated to begin in January 2025.
Westminster blog Guido Fawkes notes the Preparation Hearing didn’t make it onto the Liverpool Crown Court agenda for Friday and asserts that after so much energy was expended by the government to calm fears about the motive for the mass stabbing, that: “This will give rise to the suspicion in some quarters that it’s because the authorities having carefully misdirected the media and the public and are now panicking about how and when to reveal ‘inconvenient facts’ which will cast the fury and the riots in a very different light.”
As reported in August six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport, near Liverpool.